The present invention deals with spoken language understanding. More specifically, the present invention deals with the use of statistical classification for spoken language understanding.
Natural language understanding is the process of receiving at a computer an input expressed as a natural language input. The computer then attempts to understand the meaning of the natural language input and take any desired action based on the natural language input.
Two types of natural language inputs which interfaces have attempted to accommodate in the past include type-in lines and speech inputs. Type-in lines simply include a field into which the user can type a natural language expression. Speech inputs include a speech recognition engine which receives a speech signal input by the user and generates a textual representation of the speech signal.